Best Picture: The King’s Speech
The King’s Speech also won Academy Awards for Directing (Tom Hooper), Best Actor (Colin Firth), and Writing – Original Screenplay (David Seidler).
Inception tied with The King’s Speech with four Oscars.
The Fighter was the first film since Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986 to win both Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress.
All four winners in the acting categories were first-time winners.
Toy Story 3 won Best Animated Feature. Toy Story and Toy Story 2 were released prior to the creation of the Animated Feature category.
God of Love, the winner of the Live Action Short Film category, had won the Gold Medal in the Narrative category at the 2010 Student Academy Awards.
Rick Baker, who won the first Academy Award for Makeup with 1981’s An American Werewolf in London, was the co-winner, with Dave Elsey, for Makeup for The Wolfman.
Anne Hathaway and James Franco were the hosts, marking the first time a female-male duo had shared the same Oscar stage for hosting duties.
James Franco was also nominated for his performance in 127 Hours. It was the first time since 1973 that a host was also a nominee (Michael Caine for Sleuth). The last co-host to win an award at the ceremony he was co-hosting was David Niven (in 1959 for Separate Tables).
In September 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (the subject of the film “The Social Network”) made headlines by donating $100 million of his personal Facebook stock to the Newark, New Jersey school system; he was subsequently named Time’s Person of the Year for 2010 in December.
Honorary Award
To Kevin Brownlow for the wise and devoted chronicling of the cinematic parade.
Honorary Award
To Jean-Luc Godard for passion. For confrontation. For a new kind of cinema.
Honorary Award
To Eli Wallach for a lifetime's worth of indelible screen characters.
Irving G. Thalberg Award
To Francis Ford Coppola for a consistently high quality of motion picture production.